Satoru rose. He stripped off the white robes. Underneath, he wore a muddy brown kimono—the clothes he had arrived in.
“The code,” Chiyo spat, “was written by men who never bled. The Bushido you worship is a hundred years old at most. Before that, samurai killed themselves however they pleased. Seppuku is politics. Harakiri is pain.”
“And how many of those men truly chose it?”
“I don’t want to die,” Satoru said.
One was Master Kenji, a grizzled kaishakunin —the second who severs the head in ritual suicide. The other was a young ronin named Satoru, who had that morning failed to prevent a supply caravan from being overrun by bandits. Forty-seven men died. Satoru survived. For a samurai of Lord Tadamasa’s house, survival alone was an obscenity.
